SODA Overview

Faculty, researchers and students in the socio‑technical data analytics group at the iSchool at Illinois design, develop, and evaluate new technologies in order to better understand the dynamic interplay between information, people and technology.

We are a highly interactive group with complementary areas of interest that span a range of genres from the humanities and everyday life, to journalism, scientific literature and the geopolitical domain. Our research approaches draw on techniques in information retrieval, data and text mining, knowledge discovery, social computing and collaboration, and network analysis. Our domains typically include text, but we also explore multi‑media such as games and music, and social media data such as twitter feeds.

Funding partners include Google, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Environmental Change Institute.

Contact Us

Dr. Catherine Blake, clblake@illinois.edu
Associate Director, Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship
Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences
and Medical Information Science
and Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign